JAN MATULKA (1890-1972)
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Biography • Jan Matulka (1890-1972)
Jan Matulka was born in South Bohemia near Prague. In 1907 the Matulka family immigrated to the United States, settling in the Bronx. Matulka studied painting, drawing and printmaking at the National Academy of Design from 1908 to 1917, receiving numerous awards for his work. He began to develop his modern style as early as 1913 after visiting the Armory Show in New York.
In 1917 Matulka received a Joseph Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship which enabled him to travel to the American Southwest, following in the path of many American Modernists. The highlight of Matulka’s trip to New Mexico and Arizona was staying with the Hopi Indians, which led to a series of paintings based on Hopi dances. The artist then traveled to Florida and possibly the Caribbean in 1918. Matulka returned to New York where he quickly became active in the art scene. He developed friendships with American colorist painters Jay Van Everen and James Daugherty, which led to the inclusion of his abstract paintings in Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme exhibition in 1920.
Matulka’s internationalism, including his firsthand exposure to Czech Modernism, put him in a unique position to become a conduit between established European and American stylistic traditions. In America, Matulka found a source for many landscapes, seascapes and still lifes on summer trips to Maine, Cape Cod, Lake George, and Provincetown. Matulka maintained a studio in Paris from 1925 to 1934 and from there made trips to Czechoslovakia. His work kept pace with advanced methods and theories of modern art as Matulka visited major exhibitions such as the Salon des Indépendents and the “Exhibition of American Art” in Paris in 1924. As a result, Matulka had a highly recognizable style of representational cubism by 1930, which used the shapes of objects to create colorful and flattened abstract arrangements. He juxtaposed areas of shape, color, and texture while investigating the pictorial and spatial relationships between these objects. Using his own style of cubism he was able to paint the city; human figures; landscapes throughout New York, New England, and Europe; American Indians and cowboys in the Southwest; dancers in Paris and Prague; still life arrangements; and natural seaside compositions.
In New York at the Art Students League, where he was a teacher from 1929 to 1936, he formed close relationships with Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, and Arshile Gorky, who appreciated and encompassed many of the structural and philosophical attributes found in Matulka’s work. Matulka was known as a radical instructor with modernist theories. Despite the opposition of other instructors, Matulka also gave private lessons, developing a dedicated following of students which included David Smith and Francis Criss. Matulka was a talented teacher; he could shift easily from one style to another to accommodate subject matter, while being equally adept at Academic Realism, Post-Impressionism, Synchromist-like abstraction, and Cubism and Surrealism in varying degrees of abstraction.
Beginning in the early 1930s, Matulka participated in the Surrealist movement in New York and Paris. Along with friends such as Arshile Gorky, he began to see Surrealism as a pathway to personal exploration of metaphysics. Matulka’s surrealist impulse manifested itself in biomorphic abstract figures. In 1936, he visited the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art with Gorky. For Matulka, Surrealism had the potential to make a visual connection with his unconscious and free him from his cubist roots, giving him greater opportunity for invention.
Between 1933 and 1939, during the Great Depression, Matulka painted canvases for the Public Works of Art Project and executed two murals for the Federal Art Project, including the Williamsburg Housing Project murals in 1937. In 1934 as the effects of the Depression worsened, Matulka had to give up his Paris studio. Now permanently in New York, he took up still lifes in his studio, feeling that a set group of objects offered limitless compositions and the opportunity to explore multiple representational vocabularies.
Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s Jan Matulka continued to explore new avenues of styles. In the 1940s he even experimented with a sort of dropped, gestural style akin to Abstract Expressionism.
Both pioneer Modernist and Regionalist artists lost recognition and opportunity for regular exhibition at the end of the 1940s. However, in 1969, David Smith’s comments in a Guggenheim retrospective catalogue about the modernism of his old teacher led to Matulka’s reemergence and a retrospective in 1979 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Today, the best biographical sketch of Jan Matulka is Patterson Sims’ highly detailed account in the catalogue of the Whitney retrospective.